Hope, Despair and Memory

In “Hope, Despair and Memory,” Wiesel aims to persuade listeners of the importance of hope and memory in the face of despair. All three terms feature in the speech’s title and recur several times throughout it.

Wiesel employs the first-person plural throughout this speech, sometimes referring to himself as part of the Jewish community and at other times to himself as part of humanity in general. The technique highlights The Jewish Experience as Reflective of Human Rights, implicitly linking the Holocaust to the oppression of other groups. Wiesel later enumerates some of these groups—e.g., Black South Africans under apartheid—but he also draws out lessons for humanity broadly. In addition to sharing identity, Wiesel says, humanity shares a destiny—one that Wiesel argues is up to humanity itself to decide.

The speech begins with an anecdote about Rabbi Baal-Shem-Tov, also known as the Besht, who struggles with the loss of his memory during exile. Wiesel uses this anecdote as an analogy. Like the Besht, humanity’s hope relies on memory—a memory communicated via language, as evidenced by the fact that reciting the alphabet restores the Besht’s memory and powers. The relationship between memory, language, and salvation reemerges later in the speech, when Wiesel describes the urgency many Holocaust survivors felt to write their experiences down. Wiesel explains that many survivors documented their stories in the belief that doing so would prevent future genocides and wars from occurring. Though this did not happen, the testimonials that emerged illustrate The Alliance of Hope and Memory to Avoid Despair—the idea that hope for the future paradoxically depends on remembering the traumas of the past.

For Wiesel, part of the horror of the Holocaust, therefore, lies in the way it disconnected people from both the past and future, and thus from both memory and hope: “Stripped of possessions, all human ties severed, the prisoners found themselves in a social and cultural void. ‘Forget,’ they were told, ‘Forget where you came from; forget who you were. Only the present matters’” (7). Having lost both personal and cultural identity, those in concentration camps also lost any sense of the future, except as leading inevitably to death. This sequestration in the present was its own form of dehumanization, Wiesel suggests, implying that the ability to remember and to hope are crucial aspects of human experience: “Life in this accursed universe was so distorted, so unnatural that a new species had evolved” (7).

Wiesel acknowledges the impossibility of truly conveying this experience to outsiders but argues that it is important to try—another of the speech’s paradoxes. To that end, he tries to evoke the sense of an “unnatural” universe through his rhetorical choices. In describing the loss of his father, mother, and sister, Wiesel switches to third-person narration, as though his past self were someone else that he is remembering and memorializing. This disconnect echoes his remark that in the concentration camps, even the living were in some sense dead: “Waking among the dead, one wondered if one was still alive” (7). Wiesel also alludes to and inverts the story of the Tower of Babel from the Book of Genesis. During the Holocaust, Wiesel says, humanity moved away from God by creating an “anti-heaven” that turned God’s creation upside down (6), filling it with silence rather than language (as in the Tower of Babel) and death rather than life. In this distorted world, people’s attributes are similarly reversed: The young seem old and the old seem young. The series of inversions seeks to elicit a sense of instinctive, uncanny wrongness.

The allusion to the Tower of Babel also demonstrates that the Holocaust was not part of God’s vision. It was the work of humanity—a perversion of God’s universe. This lays the groundwork for The Argument for Pacifism that emerges as the speech continues. Since war and other atrocities are the work of people, Wiesel argues, humanity cannot look to God for “peace”; it is a “gift” that humans must give themselves. This raises another paradox, as Wiesel observes that a completely just world is impossible while simultaneously holding it up as an ideal. To remind listeners of what is at stake, Wiesel uses the term “total destruction” to refer to potential mutual annihilation via the Cold War. He warns that humanity must recall the horrors of war to avoid a nuclear holocaust.